WoW – More fun together!

Like a chicken with its head cut off

I have not been very talkative this week! I’m feeling ok, just distracted by things outside of WoW. Good things. Life is awesome. And it’s winding down to the end of tourist season here so we’ve been enjoying the great outdoors more – it’s more fun to take the kayak out when the beach isn’t packed with people.

Anyway. Friday night we went to Firelands and killed Shannox like usual. Then Beth’tilac – she went down pretty easy. I think we had to try her twice? The first time we had some confusion about getting the away team aloft. Or we may have recovered from that, I honestly don’t remember. Anyway, she died.

We went and tried Baleroc. It was our first week on him with Log in the group and that was an issue, because we’d been working with Log earlier in the day and he was currently sporting two tank specs and basically didn’t even have dps gear. No two hander, nothing. Still it was possible that the other dps could do enough that he could dps in tank spec and we’d still get it. We gave it a try, and got most of the way through before I let people die, but the math said we’d hit the enrage timer before Baleroc was dead.

So we switched to Log tanking but…. it didn’t work. Not a reflection on Log, but our strategy is basically built around Reversion dodging half the Decimation blades, and warriors can’t do that. Again, I struggled with my healing tasks as well. I just kept letting dps die when it was my turn to heal them.

Finally after several attempts, Log agreed that he should step out for this one, and I talked to Squishi, who was online. Squishi agreed to come help once he was done with his Zul-heroic. So we went and killed Ryolith while we waited, then it was cloes to end time anyway so Log went to bed and I got Squishi in. We smacked down Baleroc and called it a night – four bosses, one evening, and I got two upgrades! (Offhand from Shannox and my wrists from Baleroc).

Saturday night we were back and ready to start facing the infamous giant bird. Kerick and I are two healing this fight, so I knew it was going to be a stretch, but not how much of a stretch. Let’s see.

First, I am not supposed to do much healing on anyone but my tank. Ok… I’ll work hard on that. Second, I’m solely responsible for that tank. Ouch. Third, I can cast while moving, but that doesn’t make it easy. Oh, and the way I usually cancel casts by moving? That doesn’t work. Ooops.

I ran into fire worms. I stood in brush fire. I died to who even knows what. I let the tank die because I was accidentally healing Grom. I used Nourish instead of Healing Touch and he died. Bleah. I love my cooldowns but Alys has me wanting a real tank CD for the first time ever.

We got to the tornado phase several times, and of those, half the time I followed the tornados properly and half the time I died. Oops.

I don’t want to sound like a downer. I really like this fight, it’s awesome. Tons of fun. I just wish it didn’t illustrate what a bad raider I can be!

It did help me with my “diagnose what’s wrong” skills. People would die and say they didn’t know why, so I’d go look at Recount’s death chart and tell them why. Sometimes it took some thinking, because the last piece of damage maybe wasn’t what really killed them. That part was fun.

Anyway three hours in, Ado mentions we have BH and I jump at the suggestion. I was so tired and unable to focus that I knew I’d hit my wall. And Sorak mentioned Cho’gall so we had to go do that too – ugh, yet another kill and he’s still never dropped that trinket. We did have both a Cho’gall and a Nef lockout with just them up, which is great, means if the alts who had those lockouts don’t get saved again we can do that over and over! Which I think Sorak is rooting for.

Occu’thar dropped mage pants, so that was nice.

Anyway, good set of raiding. I still like where we are as a team. We’ve had good progression for the last month! If we can just get fire bird down, we’ll be in good shape!

As for Alysra, the only real advice I can give on it is to just take each part at a time. It is a lot to see and deal with the first couple of times you see the fight. Once you get used to what you are seeing it gets MUCH easier.